Packaged scrapers you can run on demand: inputs, outputs, pricing, and scaling patterns for Apify Actors—ship repeatable extraction jobs faster.
Apify Actors are packaged scrapers and automations you run on demand, with defined inputs, outputs, and pricing. These guides cover running Store actors, understanding their cost models, and building your own.
Actors let you ship repeatable extraction jobs without managing servers, from a one-click Store scraper to custom code you deploy. Below you will find guides on using, scaling, and building Apify Actors.
An Apify Actor is a serverless scraper or automation packaged for cloud execution. You write standard Node.js code, push it to Apify, and it runs on demand — with built-in proxies, storage, scheduling, and API access included.
This tutorial takes you from an empty folder to a deployed, runnable Actor in about 20 minutes.
Freshness note: Steps verified with Apify CLI 3.x and Apify SDK 3.x (March 2026).
A single Playwright script on your laptop is easy to reason about. Crawling millions of URLs with hundreds of workers, rotating proxies, and durable storage is a different job: you need orchestration, quotas, and clear failure behavior.
Apify is a platform for running containerized scrapers (“Actors”) in the cloud, with built-in storage, proxies, and scheduling. This post walks through the main pieces and a few limits to plan around.
An Apify Actor is a containerized program that runs on Apify to scrape sites or automate browsers. Each Actor defines structured input, writes to datasets or key-value stores, and streams logs in the console. Authors publish them to the Store with documented pricing, often mixing platform compute with per-item charges.
Choose a Store Actor or deploy your own, fill the input form or JSON payload, then start a run from the UI or API using your token. Wire webhooks for completion and download datasets as JSON or CSV. Tune memory, timeouts, and max items to control cost, and add proxies when sites fingerprint headless browsers.
Actors package full crawler logic, unlike ScraperAPI-style single-request proxies. Compared with a raw VPS running Playwright, Apify adds queues, hosted scaling, and a marketplace. Versus Firecrawl URL-to-markdown API, Actors are lower-level and more customizable. Review maintainer activity before betting production on niche Store Actors.
Official and widely used Store Actors are commonly production-ready, but always test on your URLs and monitor spend. Compute is billed in RAM-hour units, so heavy browser Actors cost more than lean HTTP jobs. Use the free tier small credit to validate schemas, then upgrade for higher RAM, concurrency, and support.
